You’re stuck inside on a rainy summer day when SUDDENLY… your phone dies! Confined to your house and left alone with your boredom you search for something to help pass the time. Eureka! You make your way up the stairs to the attic only to find your Grandfather’s dusty old arcade machine! You plug it in, insert a coin and… you will have to play the game for yourself to find out the rest!

Funny enough the Toronto ERA team actually did decide to make the best of a rainy Saturday indoors and conquered Unlock!’s new Heroic Adventure Series! The three adventures included in the series are Insert Coin, Sherlock Holmes: The Scarlet Thread of Murder and the Pursuit of the White Rabbit. For this review, we are going to focus on the level one adventure within the series, Insert Coin.

Similar to other titles in the Unlock! series, Insert Coin is mostly comprised of a deck of cards and not much else. These cards are of good quality and showcase some incredibly fun graphics that we are sure players will find very nostalgic. One thing that we have noticed is that the Unlock! games seem to get better and better every series and the Heroic Adventure Series is no exception. Where this improvement was most apparent was the incredible use of the Unlock! App throughout the game.

While determining how immersive a play-at-home game is can often be somewhat hard to gauge, this was not the case with Insert Coin. The 2D card graphics paired with an excellent soundtrack really lent to the overall experience, making it hard to recall that you weren’t actually playing/ hacking an old arcade game. We felt that Insert Coin was a nostalgically fun trip down memory lane, however, as with most play at home escape game, you are only going to get as much out of it as you are willing to put it in.

While Insert Coin’s immersion and components were quite solid, we felt the puzzles in the game took a bit of a back seat. Unlike many of the other titles in the Unlock! catalog, you will not need to utilize your observation skills very often. Instead, while thematically appropriate and very nostalgic, most solutions often seemed like quite a stretch and required large leaps of logic to solve (try saying that three times fast). Also, please know that we would not recommend this game to be played with more than 3 players as the game itself is very linear and does not allow multiple puzzles to be worked on at once.

Finally, was Insert Coin fun? Yes, it certainly is enjoyable though it did take longer to get in to then usual. We definitely feel that fans of old arcade games will enjoy it significantly more as the nostalgic factor, 2D graphics and amazing soundtrack could play a large role in the overall fun factor. This mixed with some really neat new features on the app make it a decent addition to the increasingly impressive Unlock! series.